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So, I have been spending a bit of my time lately working on a web-based game, The Caves and Civilizations of Draconika. You can see that it is still in its very early stages of development, but here is a screen shot:

It is a wargame, much like Risk or Diplomacy. Each player will start out with a single territory, and will try to become a great civilization through conquest, diplomacy, and trade.

I am using MySQL for the database, PHP for the server-side coding, and Flash for parts of the user interface, including the main map. Although my forte is ASP.NET development, I’m using the LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL, and PHP) stack for this project because:

I’ll be hosting this on a Linux server.

I do Windows/IIS/ASP.NET/SQL Server every day at work, so this is a good way to help develop some of my other abilities.

I’d like to do some fairly involved integration with VBulletin, which is written in PHP.

Now, I’m using Flash for the map and some other parts of the UI, because it can do some pretty cool effects, and it’s faster/smoother than dynamic image generation. Every other web-based wargame I’ve found on the internet looks darn ugly, and I thought it would be cool if I could make one that looks totally awesome.

One neat thing I’m doing with the project is using AJAX and web services to get information from the server dynamically, so you don’t have to refresh the page all the time.

So, keep reading for more news about this project over the next several months. Thanks for reading!